Institutions Quotes

“Marriage is a fine institution, but I'm not ready for an institution.”
― Mae West, The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said

“Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”
― Richard Dawkins

“When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance, but I cannot pity her: she is white. She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it. She persisted, and her subsequent reaction is something that all of us have known at one time or another. She did something every child has done-she tried to put the evidence of her offense away from her. But in this case she was no child hiding stolen contraband: she struck out at her victim-of necessity she must put him away from her-he must be removed from her presence, from this world. She must destroy the evidence of her offense.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
― Clay Shirky

“I just wish this social institution [religion] wasn't based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isn't true.”
― Andy Rooney, Sincerely, Andy Rooney

“The church may update its techniques and methods, but it is always in service of the institutional organism. This is one of the reasons why the pedophile priest issue is and will remain an endemic disease in the Catholic Church.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity's modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at the microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions.”
― James K.A. Smith, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church

“What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy?”
― Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books

“In a state which is really articulated rationally all the laws and organizations are nothing but a realization of freedom in its essential characteristics. When this is the case, the individual’s reason finds in these institutions, only the actuality of his own essence, and if he obeys these laws, he coincides, not with something alien to himself, but simply with what is his own. Freedom of choice, of course, is often equally called ‘freedom’; but freedom of choice is only non-rational freedom, choice and self-determination issuing not from the rationality of the will but from fortuitous impulses and their dependence on sense and the external world.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lecciones de Estetica

“Invariably, knowledge dictates life, liberty, and death, but those who have historically occupied the seats of power not only dictate what is defined as knowledge but also dictate what’s included, what’s excluded, and how it is filtered to society vis-à-vis America’s major institutions . . . particularly the educational system; ultimately, shaping the very essence of life.”
― Martin Guevara Urbina, Latino Access to Higher Education: Ethnic Realitites and New Directions for the Twenty-first Century

“It is not the institutions that loot but the people who wear expensive suits and grace our boardrooms and television sets to lecture the world about ethics.”
― DON SANTO

“The reality is that extreme inequality recurs again and again; to deal with it, societies need institutions capable of periodically redefining and redistributing property rights. The refusal to do so in as transparent and peaceful a manner as possible only increases the likelihood of more violent but less effective remedies.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology

“You have to be smart .

The Easy day are over.”
― Versatile Institute

“Because the only thing that can ever truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.”
― Mark Manson, Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope

“Scaling national government up to the planet, creating a global government, was no solution. The puzzle of the neoliberal ­century was to find the right institutions to sustain the often strained balance between the economic world and the po­liti­cal world.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

“One has to dress up, as the uniform of various institutions of society, accordingly to the rules since that builds discipline; one can neither apply its choice nor ignore the rules. In this context, one may prefer this, and that term, which embraces failure, without objection. Similarly, one should understand one's society's rules and traditional and religious values; otherwise, one can domicile, where one's choices fit. It is clear that the minority is incapable, to surpass the majority.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Worthy of note is the detail that there are NO secular ‘ex-gay’ institutions, only religious ones, which use religion-based homophobia enforced by those who deem LGBT people ‘undesirable’ for questionable religious reasons.

It is obvious that religious prejudice appears to be the sole force behind demands that LGBT people cease to exist – and since religion has no basis in fact, the response therefore to such unfounded prejudice should also be obvious, by demolishing it.”
― Christina Engela, Pearls Before Swine

“But there is a difference between the systematic evil of totalitarianism and the ordinary corruption we find in all institutions, at all times. Totalitarianism is a system of highly organized murder and oppression, driven by ideology. American institutions, in comparison, were not created to facilitate mass murder and dictatorship.”
― J.R.Nyquist

“If government is for the people. Why is it hard for normal citizens to work for government ?, especially if there is high rate of unemployment.”
― De philosopher DJ Kyos

“It is the little platoons, rather than the great society, which command attention in this new version of the national past; the spirit of place rather than that of the common law or the institutions of representative government.”
― Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture

“They talked about the way society is in fact controlled through the imposition of false needs, and how criticism of society is effectively and systematically suppressed by being infiltrated into institutions. They spoke of a closed technological society which creates a new totalitarianism, and in it there is no place for those outside the process of production. About the fact that the only way out of the comfortable, rationalized, undemocratic freedom offered by developed industrial civilization is through rebellion. About the fact that revolution is possible only through awareness but that awareness in itself demands revolution.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“[The Kerner R]eport does not say that Americans are racist. If it did, the only answer would be to line everybody up, all 200 million of us, then line up 200,000 psychiatrists, and have us all lie on couches for ten years trying to understand the problem and for ten years more learning how to deal with it. All over the country people are beating their breasts crying mea culpa--"I'm so sorry that I am a racist"--which means, really, that they want to cop out because if racism is to be solved on an individual psychological basis, then there is little hope.

What the Kerner Report is really saying is that the institutions of America brutalize not only Negroes but also whites who are not racists but who in many communities have to use racist institutions. When it is put on that basis, we know we cannot solve the fundamental problem by sitting around examining our innards, but by getting out and fighting for institutional change.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down The Line

“Among the organizational means that humans have used to commit aggression against each other, those recognized as governments have been by far the most harmful. However they have not been the only institutional instruments of aggression. Other institutions – churches, corporations, groups such as the mafia and the narco-cartels, etc. – have also committed aggression on a scale that exceeds the individual capacity for evil. Although they did not call themselves governments, one could say they acted governmentally. Meanwhile, though rarely, some governments have mostly left people in peace. Therefore I say that government is as government does.”
― Starchild

“Institutionalized education is the door and money is the key.”
― Goitsemang Mvula

“War is the great auditor of institutions”
― Correlli Barnett, The Swordbearers: Supreme Command in the First World War